I finally decided to move to Feedburner for managing the RSS feed for this site. I had known about Feedburner for a while but didn’t really look into them a lot, until their acquisition by Google piqued my interest. After using their service for a while, I can see why Google would want to buy this company - their service, even the free version, simply rocks.

Feedburner, at its most fundamental level, allows a publisher to keep track of the readership statistics regarding their feed. This makes it easy to manage your feeds, and see how many people are reading them, and look at the overall trends in readership level over a time period. Seeing as how Google Analytics offers this sort of service, but instead for your website, it’s easy to see why Google would want to make Feedburner part of their list of services.

In many respects, the services are very similar, both in features and interface. Both offer tools related to monetization (either the Google AdSense program or Feedburner’s ad network), and both offer thoroughly detailed stats on your readership base. There is some overlap, however, as Feedburner can also be used to track site usage statistics like Google Analytics. I’m interested to see how this changes as Feedburner becomes part of the Google empire. Feedburner also offers some interesting options for enhancing your feed, allowing you to add links to each entry in your feed for such options as “Email this”, “Comments Count” or “Digg this”. These options are very nice for helping to increase your site’s popularity. Another nice benefit of using Feedburner is that since your feed is accessed from their site, they’ll have a cached copy in case your server goes down. They also use some fancy-detection to enable the feed’s contents to show up in XHTML when a browser (non-news reader app) clicks on the link.

If you have a site, especially a blog, there’s simply no reason not to use Feedburner. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

I’m a big fan of Google Reader, as I use it everyday to keep track of my feeds. As I mentioned before, I think RSS is one of the good buzzwords surrounding “web 2.0″, though some may disagree. Since RSS is a web-centric technology, it only makes sense to view them in another web-application, in my opinion. I’ve always liked using Google Reader, but admittedly some changes were needed.

For the most part, the changes are good. However, there are a few things I don’t like. For one, Google is a search-centric company, so why did they remove the search field that used to be front-and-center? (And still is for GMail) I loved using that, since you could either search using keywords or enter a feed’s URI to subscribe to it. The search field is still there, but you need to click on “Browse” or “Add subscription”, which adds another small but noticeable delay.

However, I have quite easily adjusted to the changes, so that’s a good indication. Google got most of the things right here, and I wouldn’t switch away from Google Reader for a desktop application just because it’s accessible from anywhere. For those who are diehards for the old interface, Google is still allowing users to switch back to the old interface for the time being.

A little background

The history of RSS is complex and coloured with many differing non-compatible standards all using this three-letter acronym. Of these, RSS 2.0 and RSS 0.91 seem to be the most popular, with perhaps RSS 2.0 becoming more popular with time. You shouldn’t have to worry about all of these differences, as anyone who makes a quality news reader/aggregator, the software used to subscribe to these feeds is probably aware of this and has made their software compatible with all these different versions.

To further add to the confusion, another syndication format, Atom was also developed back in 2003, in response to RSS not being an open format, such as XHTML. As a result, Atom was developed, and is the only format with the IETF’s backing, and hence the only format with a proper, recognized, MIME-type. It thus has a large following among the geeks and tech-saavy, who are perhaps the only people in the world concerned with such things - not that this is such a bad thing. However, most common folk only care “that it works”. (Note: WordPress offers Atom feeds as well as RSS feeds; I simply have not linked to them for brevity and so as not to create confusion with multiple feed links for the same content.)

So, how does it work?

In very basic terms, syndicated content doesn’t utilize any new web technologies, in contrast with, for example, BitTorrent. Instead, to create an RSS/Atom feed, a website will make another copy of regularly-updated content, except it will be formatted and marked up in a certain, XML-friendly way, so that it can be read easily by news readers/aggregators. This file is known as the “feed”, or its location as the “feed URL”. The contents of the feed have been formatted very carefully, and if you were to look at the source, it would look similar to HTML markup, except maybe a bit more complicated.

These feeds are almost always generated by software, and not by hand, thus they fit very nicely into most blogging and CMS software. They usually only contain content, and some useful metadata about it, such as publishing date, author and so forth, and thus allow the reader to get at what’s useful, without having to remember to visit that website.

How’s it helpful?

On their own, the feeds wouldn’t be very much use. But the other side of it is client software called feed readers, news readers or aggregators. These allow the reader to “subscribe” to feeds that they choose - in effect, making a list of sites whose content they are interested in seeing when it is updated with new information.

I hesitate to use the word “subscribe”, since although it’s useful to describe the concept (sort of like subscribing to a magazine you like), the process is not the same. Unlike subscribing to a newspaper that’s delivered to your doorstep (A “push” service), news readers actually subscribe by “pulling” the data to your computer. Thus, a news reader will check a feed to see if it’s been updated; if it has, it will download the new data. Thus unsubscribing is fully within your grasp; the act of “unsubscribing” merely means removing the feed URL from your reader, so there’s no real possibility of spam like with e-mail.

It’s useful since it allows you to dilute the vast quantity of new information on the web everyday down to what you consider to be useful. If you’re like me, you are interested in stuff like web design, development, technology and the like. Once I find a site or blog that I like, I subscribe to its RSS feed, and thus I no longer have to continually search the web to find interesting information, and can keep up to date on new developments.

So, how do I get started?

Syndication has been around for long enough that there are many mature news readers out there. Wikipedia used to have a good list, but it was deleted by the admins over there after an extensive discussion, because we all know how evil link lists can be and how they’re destorying Wikipedia and the moral fabric of America. However, they did link to this somewhat hard-to-read directory of RSS readers - the list is huge.

There are different types of readers, based on what you need. The traditional reader will install
onto your computer and provides an interface similar to an e-mail client. Popular ones include clients from NewsGator, and of course the built-in functionality offered by Mozilla’s Thunderbird client, and the “Live bookmark” option in Firefox. However, the built-in options in Thunderbird and Firefox are limited, in my opinion.

The other, newer breed are web applications that provide news aggregation. Currently, I’m using Google Reader, and am liking it. While it may not offer all the functionality of a regular software client, I like the fact that I can access it from any computer, and it’s fairly fast. Subscribing to feeds is also very easy; you don’t even need to entire the correct feed URL. If you enter a website URL (such as http://unitstep.net), it will automatically see if there’s any feed URLs linked from the site, and will subscribe to them. The layout is also decent, and I haven’t had any problems with it. Google Reader even provides a feed of its own, so you can subscribe to this feed to view your aggregated feeds!

Other options include “widgets”, either for desktop widget engines such as the Yahoo! Widget Engine, or online widgets for portal sites such as Google’s “I Google”, or Microsoft’s new Live service. These allow you to view your feeds in small boxes of information that are part of a personalized home page. I don’t really use these types of sites all that much, but they can be useful to many so its worth a mention.

Your world, your information

So, in conclusion, get out there, and start feeding! It’s easier to read and absorb useful information when its already been stripped down to what you care about, and syndicated content is allowing that.